Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

The Concurrency Primitives

Everything we’ve learned about sequential programming is still true for concurrent programming. All we have to do is to add the following primitives:

Pid = spawn(Mod, Func, Args)

Creates a new concurrent process that evaluates apply(Mod, Func, Args). The new process runs in parallel with the caller. spawn returns a Pid (short for process identifier). You can use a Pid to send messages to the process. Note that the function Func with arity length(Args) must be exported from the module Mod.

When a new process is created, the latest version of the module defining the code is used.

Pid = spawn(Fun)

Creates a new concurrent process that evaluates Fun(). This form of spawn always uses the current value of the fun being ...